Charlie’s target was Mrs Pearce.
He got his first chance three days later when the subject of explorers came up. Scott losing the race to the North Pole and dying on the way, Livingstone trekking up the Zambezi River, Captain Cook sailing to Australia and eating biscuits with weevils in.
“Have you ever explored anywhere, Mrs Pearce?”
It was Charlie’s voice. I twisted round in my seat. There was a small, bandaged hand sticking up in the air.
“Of course not,” replied Mrs Pearce, smiling and shaking her head.
She was right. It was a pretty stupid question. With her tweed suit and her handbag, I couldn’t imagine Mrs Pearce exploring anything more dangerous than the freezer cabinet in Sainsbury’s.
“I mean, haven’t you been anywhere exciting?” Charlie soldiered on. “Like Africa or India or someplace?”
It all sounded a bit heavy-handed to me. Charlie had never shown much interest in history before. But she was delighted by his question.
“I’m afraid not,” she said, taking off her glasses and polishing them with her handkerchief. “I’ve never actually been abroad. I go to Scotland most summers, but I don’t think that counts as exploring.”
I was waiting for Charlie at the school gates, wondering what on earth we did now. If they had a secret, they were covering their tracks extremely well. So well that I was beginning to wonder if the conversation we overheard was nothing more than a very vivid dream.
“Jimbo,” panted Charlie as he ran up to me. “Sorry I’m late. Had to get the walkie-talkie out of the staff room.”
“And what story did you tell this time?”
“Got the headmistress to sign me off sport for a month. You know” — he held up his bandaged hand — “told her it was doctor’s orders.”
“So what happens when the headmistress talks to your mum at the next parents’ evening?”
Charlie shook his head. “She never gets a word in edgeways.”
“So,” I said, getting back to the important subject, “what do we do now?”
“We should have recorded them,” said Charlie. “If we could play the conversation back then maybe—” He stopped mid-sentence and looked back towards the school. “I’ve had an idea.”
I turned and saw Mr Kidd walking across the playground towards us, juggling his briefcase in one hand and his car keys in the other.
“All this suspense is driving me up the wall,” said Charlie. “Let’s do this the simple way.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling slightly panicky.
Charlie stepped out into Mr Kidd’s path. He waited until Kidd came to a halt in front of him, then said, in a cheery voice, “Spudvetch!”
Mr Kidd froze for a second. Then his briefcase slid out of his hand and fell to the ground. He didn’t seem to notice. His jaw started to move up and down but he was obviously having trouble getting any words out.
I started to feel a bit ill.
“But you’re not—” said Mr Kidd. Then he stopped himself.
His fingers clenched and his back stiffened like an angry cat’s. And then something happened to his eyes. If Charlie hadn’t seen it too, I might have thought I was imagining it. But I wasn’t imagining it. For the briefest of moments there was a fluorescent blue light flickering behind his pupils, just like the eyes on Charlie’s robot piggy bank. Except that Mr Kidd wasn’t a robot piggy bank. He was our art teacher.
I was about to turn and run when, as suddenly as it had begun, it was all over. His eyes returned to normal. Slowly and deliberately he put his right hand over his left wrist, as if calming himself down. He breathed deeply and said, “You off home, boys?”
I tried to say, “Yes,” but it came out as a strangled squeak.
Charlie was on his knees, refilling Mr Kidd’s briefcase. He stood up and handed it back.
“Thank you.” Mr Kidd smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Have a good evening, boys.”
We stood and watched him walk into the car park. He pressed his key fob and the indicator lights on his battered Fiat winked back with a little boop-boop noise.
“Crikey,” said Charlie.
A swarm of fizzy white lights started floating across my field of vision. The sky started to spin round, my knees went wobbly and I had to sit on the wall to stop myself fainting.
5
Burglary
I woke up in the middle of the night, thinking that Mr Kidd was standing over my bed holding a bread knife, grinning broadly and saying, “Have a good evening. Have a good evening. Have a good evening,” as the fluorescent blue light flickered in his eyes.
I checked inside the wardrobe. I checked under the bed. I checked the balcony and the bathroom and behind the sofa. And I still couldn’t get back to sleep. So I found a packet of garibaldi biscuits and watched Star Wars until everyone else started waking up. Then I went into my room and pressed my forehead against the radiator for five minutes.
I came out and told everyone I had a sore throat and diarrhoea and it was clearly a very bad idea for me to go to school. Obviously I couldn’t say at home for ever. But for the time being I felt a lot safer lying on the sofa under a rug watching The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
“You poorly, poorly thing,” sighed Becky, who could read me like a book. “I think we ought to call an ambulance, don’t you? Shall I ring for one now?”
“Mum?” I said. “I think I’ve got a temperature. Here. Feel.”
But Mum was too busy, whirling round the flat putting lipstick on and grabbing presentation folders. “Get Dad to feel it, darling,” she said, checking her hair in the glass front of the cooker. “I’m late already.”
“I’m ringing the hospital now,” announced Becky, picking up the phone.
“Act your age and not your shoe size,” snapped Mum, taking the receiver from her, slamming it back down and scooting through the door in a cloud of perfume.
Dad wasn’t much help either. “School is important,” he said, lying on the sofa, wearing his pyjamas and watching breakfast TV. “Every day counts. You need education. You need exam results.”
“But, Dad. Feel my head. Quickly.” My forehead was cooling off. The radiator was painful and I didn’t fancy doing it a second time.
“You need qualifications,” he said, giving me his top-grade, serious-father look. “Qualifications are what stop you ending up sitting on the sofa in your pyjamas watching breakfast television while everybody else goes off to work.”
“But…”
“Jimbo” — he pointed his toast at me — “you can still walk. You can still talk. You’re not coughing blood and none of your bones are broken. Go to school.”
I thought about telling him the truth. The walkie-talkie. Spleeno ken mondermill. The robot-piggy-bank eyes. But it sounded crazy. And the last thing I needed was a weekly session with the school psychologist.
I went to get dressed, then picked up my bags and slouched out of the front door to the lift.
As it happened, there was nothing to worry about. We weren’t bundled into the back of a van. We weren’t strangled in the toilets by men in black balaclavas. Mr Kidd nodded a polite hello to us in the corridor and Mrs Pearce did the Boer War without batting an eyelid.
By lunch time I had convinced myself that it was nothing. Mr Kidd wore strange contact lenses. Or we’d seen the blue light of a police car reflected in his eyes.
He and Mrs Pearce were members of an Esperanto club, or sharing some obscure joke. I didn’t care what. I just wanted to forget the whole thing and stop being scared.